1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for annotating speech data. More particularly, the present invention relates to systems and methods for reducing the time required to annotate speech data.
2. The Relevant Technology
A dialog application is an application that is able to receive speech input, recognize the speech input, interpret the speech input, and generate a response to the speech input. Many companies use dialog applications to receive and respond to customer inquiries regarding bill payments, order status, complaints, etc. While a dialog application can reduce the costs associated with receiving and responding to customer inquiries, the development of a dialog application is an arduous task that requires considerable time to complete.
One of the tasks in developing a dialog application is to annotate the speech data that is used to build and train the automatic speech recognition system and the spoken language understanding system. Annotating the speech data for purposes of speech recognition involves, for example, identifying the phonemes that are included in each utterance of the speech data. Annotating the speech data for purposes of spoken language understanding involves using an annotation guide to assign a call type to each utterance in the speech data. Annotating the speech data is a time-consuming task because tens or hundreds of thousands of utterances are usually required to build and train the speech recognition models and the spoken language understanding models of the dialog application and it often takes fifty minutes to annotate one minute of speech data.
The amount of annotation that can be done on a particular day is limited by the number of people that are available to annotate the utterances or speech files included in the speech data. Currently, the annotation to be performed for a particular day is selected using a random selection process. Random selection is very general and does not address the deficiencies of the dialog application. The inability to quickly annotate the speech data has an impact on the development of the dialog system.